Cycle
by Bainaku
Summary: It begins, as many fortunes do, with a cup of tea, and pigeons, and muffins, and possessed jewelry.  It ends, though, as many fortunes don't:  with a stick of gum.
1. Mercury

**Commentary: **This is a story about growing up: into soldiers, but mostly into strength of all sorts. Expect five chapters at least, one for each of the Inners, and a tie-in epilogue. With that being said, at the moment I have all intentions of keeping this story Inner-centric, but might incorporate my beloved Outers too if all goes well. We'll see. =)

If you know me at all, you know already that there will eventually be **implications **in this. You have been warned.

Each of these chapters, excluding notes and titles and things, will be exactly 1,000 words. These are fun exercises for me—sorry that they're short, but hey! A gal's gotta have a good time!

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

* * *

**CYCLE**

**PART I: Mercury**

_**or**_

**Next time she'll just skip the refreshments  
**

It begins, as many fortunes do, with a cup of tea.

Approximately six months after the battle with Galaxia, Mizuno Ami is writing a paper for her ethics theory class. It is exactly three o'clock in the morning. Light from the clock on her desk paints her fingers neon blue. Her desk lamp burned out an hour ago, and though her eyes strain in the darkness, her mother only just made it to bed after working a double shift at the hospital. She—Ami's mother, that is—is a light sleeper, and for that reason Ami refuses to go rifling through the hall closet in search of a new bulb.

She yawns. Her fingers splay over the cavern of her lips. Her jaw cracks too, for good measure.

When the yawn is done, she plucks free her glasses and rubs the ridge of her palm over her eyes. Inhaling sharply and pinching her cheek, she attempts to stave off encroaching drowsiness. She succeeds only in sucking from the still air of her room a goodly amount of dust.

Her cheek also hurts now.

Her complaining sinuses tingle. She winces and squeezes her eyes shut, but the damage is done—it's too late. She is going to sneeze. Her shoulders quiver and she turns her head to the side, grappling for a Kleenex, but the sneeze comes upon her before even that preventative measure rises. She expels the dust, her breath, and an embarrassing ribbon of saliva straight into the cup of tea that's been sitting for hours nearby her keyboard. She bonks her head on the desk lamp. It squeaks, sorrowful.

"Ugh," she hisses into the darkness. She finds the Kleenex then, of course, and after she wipes her face, she moves to perform the same service for her teacup.

She is astonished to find it covered in a thin sheen of ice.

She jerks backward first, arms thrown comically upward, a shriek climbing the rungs of her throat. The memory of her mother's exhausted face flits through her head, though, and she staples her teeth over her lips before the shriek can manifest. Her spine arched in a feline kind of startlement, the rest of her body all rigid wonder, she stares at the ice-glazed cup.

She stares at it, in fact, until that ice begins to look shiny and slick and near-melting. Only when her heart rate has eased back to fifty-ish does she ease forward in her chair again. Her socked toes crawl over the floor, pulling her back toward the desk; her hands quest out. She furls them, speculative, around the cup. The ice slides wetly under her palms. She peers into the cup and notes that her tea has transformed into brown slush.

Tightening her hands, she lifts the cup. She studies it by the glow of the clock. Azure effervescence ripples through the ice's shell, lending it an eerie glacial cast. Lips parted, Ami holds the cup away from the keyboard. Where her thumb presses, the ice drips a little.

"What," she says to the room. While normally the word signifies a question, Ami feels like she already halfway knows the answer to this particular ponderance.

She looks up to the mirror resting atop her bureau. Because Ami is not vain, it is only a small oval hung from a spinning hook—mostly she uses it to check her hair in the mornings before school. Now, caught on the night's underbelly with an anomaly in her hands and a problem potentially far more severe than a cowlick weighing upon her head, she uses the mirror to check her identity instead.

Mercury, who wields ribbons of ice in her fingers, is not there: has never been there. The same face Ami sees every day at six o'clock sharp gazes back at her. The bags under the girl's eyes are more pronounced than usual, yes; her mouth wrinkles in want of sleep, sure. Still! Her reflection is that of average, everyday Mizuno Ami, a dedicated schoolgirl pulling an all-nighter. There is no sapphire-set tiara, no battle uniform.

Her eyes flick away from the mirror, back to the object she holds in her hands.

But there _is_ an ice-covered teacup.

So… where is Mercury?

Ami checks the mirror one more time, just to be certain she doesn't see the soldier in it.

No. Just a somewhat wild-eyed perhaps-genius (okay, she's being modest) with bristling blue hair and a slackened jaw and oh, yes, let's not forget the ice-covered teacup.

The clock reads seven past three in the morning now.

"I wonder," Ami whispers, and she does. She _always _wonders. Tentative, she draws the teacup near. She almost touches her cheek to it. She darts out the tip of her tongue and the ice has thankfully melted enough that the pink appendage doesn't stick to it. Cool liquid trickles against her lips, between them too.

She leans away again, staring at the cup. She squints. She tightens her fingers and she thinks, intent, feeling a little stupid, _Cold_.

Nothing happens.

She feels more than a _little_ stupid, abruptly. Shoulders heaving in a small sigh, she replaces the teacup on her desk—this time on a coaster—and gazes at it. She rubs her finger over her cheek in the dark. Said finger is still cold and damp from where it touched the cup, and it leaves a line of faint moisture just beneath her eye.

A winking idea occurs to Ami. Almost as soon as she put it down, she picks up the teacup again. She thinks this is foolish, but—

She wills silently, _Cold! _

And she breathes into the slushy tea.

Her exhale crystallizes in the small space between her lips and the cup. The tea stiffens, crackles, freezes. Brittle bubbles burst over the brown surface and the ice on the rim of the cup thickens.

"Oh," Ami says. Her fingers fall nerveless. She drops the teacup.

It shatters into pieces on the floor between her feet.


	2. Mars

**Commentary: **Part II! Nyee-hee-hee!

**Warning: **Some absolutely fictional animals were harmed in the making of this absolutely fictional work. Beware also minor amounts of cursing.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did (but I doubt it).

* * *

**CYCLE**

**PART II: Mars**

_**or**_

**You know the birds had it coming**

Only four hours after Ami drops the teacup in her bedroom, her close friend Hino Rei grunts as she pulls a ladder from the maintenance shed artfully hidden behind Hikawa's leftmost wing. The ladder is old and heavy and it creaks in her hands, but she trusts it, and she hefts it onto her shoulder to half-carry, half-drag it across the shrine's campus. It scutters and bumps across the raked earth behind her hunched form, leaving in the loam two sharp lines.

A few minutes later, Rei leans it against the shrine's gutter and climbs to the roof. She has a bucket's handle clenched in her teeth and a broom tucked beneath an arm. Once on the roof, she settles the bucket aside, shifts the broom into one hand much like she would a sword, and brandishes it at her enemy.

The wall-eyed pigeon hoots at her, too stupid to know it should fear the miko.

She smacks it gently with the broom's bristles and it flutters off, leaving a disgruntled splatter of droppings in its wake. Rei groans. She wishes Yuuichirou were here so she might pawn off this task on him—but no! He's visiting Hikawa's mother shrine in Omiya, chatting up the disciples there. Rei's grandfather recommended he make the pilgrimage. Personally, Rei thinks he just wanted Yuuichirou out from underfoot a little while, and she doesn't much blame her elder.

She does mourn Yuuichirou's absence, though, if only because it happens to coincide with Hikawa's abrupt pigeon infestation.

The birds are all places across the shrine's campus, cooing from before dawn to well past dusk. Their droppings line Hikawa's every surface: fences, trees, porches, the steps, the roof beneath Rei's feet. They fight in the courtyard, fluffing their dirty plumage and puffing out iridescent necks; they follow the shrine's patrons hopefully, always hungry. They leave feathers everywhere. They smell terrible: something like a combination of rotting fish and moldy attic.

Phobos and Deimos, the shrine's resident crows, are so disgusted with the pigeons that they have taken to sulkily preening on powerlines a full block away.

Rei's grandfather put out a wooden owl statue in hopes of frightening off the collective pestilence, but the pigeons clearly don't find it threatening. They perch on it—crap on it too, come to think.

And so, because Yuuichirou is gone and she would rather her spine ripped out than see her beloved grandfather tottering across the roof, the task of getting rid of the pigeons has fallen to Rei.

She spends nearly an hour sweeping their droppings and feathers and nest materials from the roof's sloping tiles. She clears their accrual from the gutters, nose wrinkled. A few of the birds themselves are still sleeping on the shrine's sacred ledges. She boots them off: humanely, yes, but firmly too.

Rei eventually realizes that she is fighting a losing battle. The pigeons she manages to temporarily frighten away come back to roost within minutes, aware now that the miko will not harm them. Cleaned areas are soon covered again in telltale white spatters. Her red hakama are spotted at the cuffs with… with _slimy_, crusty birdscum. Gray bits of unidentifiable fluff stick to, lodge in her umbrous hair. The sound of cooing is so thunderous that she can hear nothing else: not the honk of traffic on the street below, not the breeze rustling through the shrine's crop of healthy trees.

She looks.

No wonder: the pigeons are in the trees, too.

Rei mutters an oath she learned from the nuns at school—unlike the nuns, though, she refuses to cross herself. Rolling up her sleeves, she picks up the bucket she brought to the roof. She must wave away a few birds to get to it. After prizing free its lid, the priestess slops its contents across the slanted tiles.

She was instructed by her grandfather to use the mixture in the bucket only if she thought it absolutely necessary. She understands why instantly. Its smell assaults her: it is like hot, fresh, acrid cat piss. The wind blows it into her face. She retches, a sound similar to _Yeccch! _Her stomach rolls. She feels the stuff seep into the bottoms of her sandals and resolves to throw them away the _moment _she's back on the ground. It specks her billowy robes too.

Some of the pigeons take wing. Still more, though, find motivation to enact a dissimilar grievance: they attack Rei, hooting and clawing at her with blood-orange feet. A few, including the wall-eyed one from earlier, buffet their wings against her head. She drops the bucket. She shrieks, steps backward: she flails, and damn if one of the persistent birds doesn't have a shit right into her sleeve.

Rei thinks it—bird feces running down into her armpit—is one of the worst things that has ever happened to her.

Until, of course, another pigeon nails her right between the eyes.

Her screech of revulsion and outrage echoes across the shrine. As little ratty talons scritch across her brow and a razored beak takes a wedge-shaped chunk out of her ear, Rei abandons all pretense of religious dignity, flings out her arms, and snarls, "BURN IN _HELL_, YOU STUPID BIRDS!"

What happens next ensures that no pigeon ever flies within ten kilometers of Hikawa again.

With a distinct _fwoomp_, the entire flock of visiting fowl is roasted alive by invisible flames. The air above the shrine shimmers with the heat of the abrupt conflagration—Rei's eyebrows and eyelashes sizzle into extinction. Several of the birds explode, strewing the roof with bits of charred carcass. Smoldering feathers sift to the heavens, sough away on the breeze, litter the courtyard below. A soot-black talon soars over, lands on, and dangles from Rei's collar like a twisted voodoo charm.

It is still twitching.

"AAAAAAAH!" Rei opines, clutching at it. She adds, horrified, "AAAAHHH, AAAAHHH, _AAAAHHH_!"

She staggers right off the roof.

Luckily, a tree is there to cushion her fall.


	3. Jupiter

**Commentary: **Part III! Gosh but this is fun.

**Warning: **Implications ahead!

I hope you enjoy it. =)

* * *

**CYCLE**

**PART III: Jupiter**

_**or**_

**Muffins are quite deadly**

_Breeeee_, insists the phone.

Makoto, who worked late the previous night at the local bakery, cracks open a jaundiced eye. She rolls it toward the phone—she lifts her head too. She fell asleep at the table on a stack of invoices, and now one sticks to her cheek and flutters there.

_Breeeee_, the phone pleads again. With a low moan, Makoto reaches out, catches the receiver, drops it, curses, and falls from her chair chasing it. She eventually, on her hands and knees in the middle of her kitchen floor, fits it to her ear. The invoice crinkles between the mouthpiece and her flesh.

"'Lo?" she growls.

"Mako-chan?" a soft voice inquires in turn. It demurs, "I'm sorry—did I wake you?"

"Ami-chan?" Mako asks sleepily. She denies, "You didn't wake me, n—" and must break away from the claim to yawn. Ami giggles, and Makoto turns her lips into the receiver and smiles. She is surprised, but pleased too, to hear Ami's voice so early.

She glances at the clock on the stove. The little green numbers inform her cheerily that it is 10:02 AM.

…okay, maybe it's not _early_, but the sentiment remains unchanged.

"—something to show you," Ami finishes. "It's taken me all morning to decide that I'm not _completely_ insane, and I think you should see it first because you're the one out of the rest who's least likely to freak out, and—"

"Whoa, hold it," Makoto interrupts. "Back up." She's slowly coming awake. She opens her other eye, her lashes still smeared with sleep. She shifts the phone in her hand a little. Because she never made it to the shower the previous evening, she leaves sugar-white fingerprints across the shiny black receiver. "What?" she resumes. "You said you've got something to show me?"

Ami pauses, and Makoto listens to her breathe into the phone. The other woman's respiration is quick, excited—she licks her lips, a satin wet whisper. Makoto echoes the motion—and flushes. _Why did I do that? _she wonders.

Before she can devote much thought to the matter, Ami's voice rises once more.

She asks, "May I come over?"

"Uhm." Makoto, thoughtless, twines her fingers in the phone's crinkled cord. She winds the plastic ribbon around and around her thumb, her face hot, her smile an idiot's smile. "Sure—yeah. That's, yeah, that's fine—_hey_," she realizes. "Have you eaten yet? Today?"

"Now that you mention it," Ami disagrees, "I haven't—"

"Good." Makoto nods, even though Ami can't see her. "Me either. I'll make us breakfast."

The protest from the other soldier is immediate and contrite: "Mako-chan, you don't have to do that!"

"I know." Makoto opens the cabinet nearest her, selects a skillet, and shoves it atop the stove. It scrapes merrily across the burners. "I _want _to, though, and you'd better be here in"—she checks the clock for the second time—"thirty minutes, Ami-chan, or I'll have eaten all the muffins."

Ami pauses again. This time Makoto licks her lips. Her flush spreads over her cheeks, sweeps down her neck, and paints her collarbones red.

"…muffins?" Ami ventures. She tries not to sound too hopeful. She fails. _Miserably_.

"_Blueberry _muffins. Nuts on top." Makoto, using the chair she fell out of as a support, climbs to her feet. She opens the fridge and peers within. She tacks on, "And bacon."

"Oooo," Ami opines. "_Bacon_."

Makoto makes chomping noises into the phone. Ami giggles again, eager, and when the sound has tapered, the lightning soldier insists, "Thirty minutes! Chop chop!" and hangs up.

A mixing bowl, two cups of flour, and a cracked egg later, Makoto realizes that the invoice is still attached to her face.

After nearly an exact half hour, she takes the muffin tin from the simmering oven in time to a knock on the door. "Come in!" she calls. She carefully ladles the tin onto a cooling rack.

A shuffling sound in the hall: a round face next, peering around the kitchen's jamb. Ami, countenance scarlet and hair windswept, demands breathlessly, "Am I too late? Are there any—"

Makoto cuts her off, stepping aside to gesture to the tin with a flourish.

Ami grins—a wide, shy kind of grin—and claps her hands together gleefully. Her eyes light like night lanterns. "They smell _wonderful_, Mako-chan."

Taking a bow, the chef waves Ami to her invoice-strewn table. "Good! I hope they taste as much. Sit, sit—I'll serve. I'm up anyway. How much bacon do you want?"

Ami's eyes glint, predatory, and Makoto laughs. She thus ensures the plate she settles before her petite friend moments later sports plenty of protein.

"_Thank you_, Mako-chan. This is…" Ami, clearing away the stack of invoices to make room for two glasses of orange juice and Makoto's own plate, provides the taller girl an expression that is all admiring adoration.

Makoto puts down her plate a little too hard: two semi-squashed blueberries make a break for it, rolling away from their mother muffin around the rim of the saucer. "Aw," she dismisses, "c'mon, it's nothing." And because Ami looks like she's going to argue, she queries hastily, "So! What's this thing you need me to see, huh?"

She plunks herself down next to the smaller soldier, whose face has gone still, somber, serious. Concerned, Makoto nudges her and lifts her eyebrows.

Ami's stonewall expression wavers, softens, and she leans forward suddenly. "You've got a little flour on your nose," she says. "Here"—and she licks her thumb—"let me get it."

The small star of her hand closes the distance between them, furls over Makoto's cheek. The taller soldier inhales. The wet pad of Ami's thumb brushes her.

_TZZT._

Makoto blinks and Ami's hair is standing aloft on her skull, a feathery blue Einstein corona. Sparks dance in it. Eyes enormous, Ami exhales a faint, "Oh!" in a puff of white smoke.

She jitters and falls, face first, into her waiting muffin.


	4. Venus

**Commentary: **A day late, a dollar short. Sorry! Still had a ton of fun with this, though. =)

Some people have asked me if I'm writing a chapter for Usagi. The answer is yes. Expect that tomorrow, I hope. I will also make a decision then whether to include the Outers in this endeavor. Either way, it's been a fantastic ride!

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. =)

* * *

**CYCLE**

**PART IV: Venus**

_**or**_

**The ties that bind (and bind, and bind)**

Glorious noon washes the world golden. Her tennis shoes squeaking over the sidewalk, her hips bouncing and jiving, Aino Minako boogies her way back from the gym toward home. Her duffel bag sways on its strap on her shoulder. Her lips smack and, humming, she lets herself in through her family's gate. She seizes the mail from its slot and has just begun to mouth a trendy pop song's chorus when she looks up and discovers a soot-stained miko sitting on her front steps.

Minako has seen Rei die, and even then the woman didn't look half as craptastic as she does now. The miko's hair has wedges of tree bark stuck in it. Her calligraphic eyebrows are gone, replaced with spidery she-devil scorch marks. A gradient of what looks suspiciously like bird poop covers, up to either knee, those big floofy red pants Rei always wears.

They lock eyes. The miko sniffs. Her tongue darts out, wets her lips. Her throat makes a terrible little clinking noise. She blinks and tears film her violet gaze.

Seeing her friend's grief, Minako feels her chest hitch. Her heart swells, roars with protectiveness. She tosses her duffel into the side yard and opens her arms.

Rei jitters to her feet and folds herself, after the briefest hesitation, into Minako's grasp. She is trembling. Upon closer inspection, the blonde realizes that there are tiny charred filaments of fuzz clinging to Rei's ceremonial vestments.

Minako has time to think, _Feathers? _before Rei speaks, her face tucked to her friend's throat.

"I killed them all," she whispers. Her lips quiver against Minako's collar—her fingers find the other girl's wrist. They curl and tighten there. Disbelief colors her tone and she says again, hoarse, a half-sob, "I _killed _them _all_."

The breeze blows over them, a low _ahooo_.

Minako replies, "Oh."

She tucks an arm around Rei, spins the miko in her elbow, and marches with her into the house. Their progress hitches only in a fumble for keys.

She leads Rei through the quiet dwelling—her parents are both at work, thank goodness—to her bedroom. With the ease, speed, and graceful fluidity that come only to the soldier of love, Minako unbuttons and peels away Rei's pants, robe, and undershirt. Before the raven-haired girl is even able to formulate a protest or a yelp of embarrassment, Minako has draped a vomitous pink bathrobe about her shoulders.

She nudges Rei back onto her bed. Seconds later, the mattress bounces as Minako takes a seat next to the startled miko.

Brandishing a hot washcloth she seems to have magicked from nowhere, Minako wipes Rei's cheeks. She informs her gravely, "I knew this would happen one day."

Rei hiccoughs out a surprised, "Y-you _did_?" beneath the steaming washcloth.

Minako provides a sagely nod. "As the leader of the inner guard," she relates to the other girl, smoothing away silt and tears, "it's important for me to recognize and prepare for the various latent potentials of my fellow soldiers. Especially"—her tone gentles—"if those potentials involve violence."

Rei stares at her, her expression awed. It's the first time the miko has ever looked at her with such raw admiration, and Minako's insides do a funny sort of squirm for it.

Rubbing at a particularly dark smudge of grime, Minako resumes, "Have—have you buried them yet?"

The dark head shakes. "Not all of them—"

"I'll help you," Minako interrupts. Passing Rei the washcloth, the blonde goes to her desk. She opens its topmost drawer and rifles through the papers therein. "It's taken me a few years, but I've plotted some of the best spots—abandoned courtyards, dirt alleys, places like that. Inconspicuous-like. There's a couple of shovels in the back we can use. I bought gloves too, 'course. They're here somewhere. And—"

She finds the document she wants—labeled _Rei Goes Bonkers: Plan Alpha_—and turns to face Rei again. The miko is giving her a look now that is a mixture of grossly offended and deeply affectionate. She states, washcloth held to her cheek, "You think I've killed _people_."

Minako blinks, puzzled. "Sure," she admits. "I always knew you would. _Eventually_." She confesses next, "I seriously thought I'd be one of them, though." And then, "Wait. You _haven't_ killed people?"

"I—_no_. I wouldn't—" Rei stops. She stares at Minako for the second time in so many minutes, lips parted. "Minako-chan, you… you were going to help me _bury the bodies_?"

"Of course," Minako agrees. Her brow knits in consternation—how could Rei think otherwise? She professes, "That's what friends are for."

Rei gapes.

Minako grins and shrugs. She tucks _Plan Alpha _back into her desk and turns to her vanity to pull free her hair ribbon. "Another day, maybe," she allows. She asks, concern creeping back into her voice, "What's got you so upset, then?" She tugs open her jewelry box to find the earrings she took out prior to her venture to the gym. "Who did you ki—"

Metal ribbons beneath her fingers. Minako looks down in time to see her store of necklaces writhing like cobras under her touch. They undulate skyward. She yells out in wordless shock and jackknifes onto her bed.

The necklaces follow her, streaks of brilliance. They wind about their mistress and Rei, binding the two together—they seek vulnerable ankles, wrists, throats. The more the girls shriek and struggle and curse, the tighter the chains pull.

Two minutes later, when they are thoroughly entangled and Minako's cheek is squished into Rei's heaving breast, the blonde grates out, "Whatever happened to you was a lot like this, wasn't it?"

Rei agrees, strangled, a locket Minako received for her birthday last year scissoring down into one cup of her lavender bra, "Yep. Except without the, you know. Giant knot of awkward."

They remain as still as possible. Minako sighs into Rei's cleavage. After a moment, she hedges, "Rei-chan?"

"Yes, Minako-chan?"

"…you smell like fried chicken."


	5. Moon

**Commentary: **The last chapter. =) Though I've decided the Outers don't really have a place in this story, expect an epilogue to this that may well provide them a mention.

Thank you all so much for sticking with me through this week-long exercise. I had a great time. As always, I hope you did too.

* * *

**CYCLE**

**PART V: Moon**

_**or**_

**Boom-shaka-laka**

Six thousand miles away from her friends, Tsukino Usagi is studying a sausage.

It is not the first, the second, or even the sixteenth wurst to fall under her scrutiny, because Usagi has been stuck in the airport in Frankfurt, Germany for over twenty hours, and there are really only so many shops with so many wares to browse beyond the security and customs checkpoints. She has played with nesting dolls, examined beer steins, and marveled over cuckoo clocks—she has fiddled with fluff-bearded nutcrackers, stuffed herself full of Bavarian chocolates. She has attempted to decipher, as she is doing now, the intricacies of the common kielbasa.

She is puzzled.

She is also, she determines as she blows her bangs from her eyes, bored stupid.

Wieners just aren't terribly engaging.

Heaving a sigh, Usagi meanders back toward her gate, her carryon bag tucked under her arm. Her eyes trail longingly to the cluster of payphones along one nearby wall. They are useless to her because she ran out of change two hours ago.

She spent it on a churro.

Her gaze falls on a man sitting in a hunch beneath those payphones. He is not a remarkable individual: he is scrawny, knobby-kneed. Looking at him, Usagi feels inexplicably drawn to him nonetheless—the same way, maybe, dust motes trail to sunlight. Hitching her bag higher, she trots resolutely over to him, folds her legs, and takes a shameless seat at his side. He jerks. He looks at her.

Usagi looks back.

His eyes are brown and the lid of one is twitching a little bit. Beads of sweat stand out on his upper lip. He licks them away, and Usagi sees that his teeth—his lower ones, anyway—are perfect but for a tiny chip on an incisor.

She thinks the chip probably makes for a cute smile.

He is wearing a motorcycle jacket with a red shirt beneath it; checkerboard jeans too. He has very long eyelashes—he smells like leather, anxiety, old sugar. Usagi asks him sympathetically, "First time flying, huh?"

He stares at her. A muscle jumps in his cheek. His eyelid flutters again. He opens his mouth—his top teeth are perfect; no chips there—and his chapped lips tremble.

Usagi touches the man's wrist. It—_he_—jolts. She tells him, "I was afraid too. But don't worry! It's not scary, not _really_, and if you have, uhm…"

She trails off. Her mouth puckers. She pulls her hand away from the man and thrusts it next into her carryon. She digs around intently. Candy wrappers, a heart-shaped compact, and a small picture fall from the carryon into the space between Usagi's thigh and the stranger's hip.

He picks up the last two items—Usagi doesn't appear to notice that they have shifted free. The compact is gaudy, heavy. Its latch comes undone: the huge fake crystal behind it winks at him.

Lighting flares over the runway outside. The crystal catches its glow and throws a spatter of white specks over the man's chest.

He flips the compact closed and looks at the picture next. The girl rummaging in her bag next to him is in it, throwing the camera a peace sign. There are others too, their hair all colors, their mouths grinning, their eyes on the dumpling'd blonde at their heart.

She _is _their heart.

A silver stick wafts into his vision above the picture.

"It's spearmint gum," Usagi relates, beaming. "If you chew it during takeoff, your ears will pop and you won't even get a headache! Promise! I had some cinnamon before too, but I can't find it, sorry—"

She looks sideways, realizes he has two items that belong to her: her grin softens to a smile. She takes the compact with an embarrassed giggle and thrusts it back into her bag. She lets him keep the picture, though, and turns—her elbow jostles his—to point to its various members.

The strange girl spends the next several minutes telling him about her friends, her family, her world. She is going to visit one of them—a dark-haired man—in America. The others await her return to Tokyo. She has promised, she whispers to him, to bring them all presents, but she isn't sure she's going to be able to fit anything else in her bag.

Eventually she falls quiet. She doesn't appear to mind that he has said nothing to her: not a word. He hands her the picture, watches her slip it carefully into her carryon. He tries to give back the stick of gum too, but she shakes her head.

Furling his fingers around it, she says quietly, "You need it more than I do, I bet."

He does. He clutches it hard as the storm outside stops—as Tsukino Usagi is finally told by a warbling intercom that she may board her flight.

"I wish I'd met you sooner," she tells him, climbing to her feet. "I think you're my good luck charm!" And then, gentle but severe, "Don't forget to chew that, okay? Really."

He nods.

She smiles at him. She waves—she turns. She is a blink of brightness in the crowd for one moment, two, and then she is gone.

The man sits by himself a little while, trying to remember why he is here. When he is unable to think of a good reason, he pulls from his pocket two things: a counterfeit plane ticket and a small remote. He throws the first into the nearest trash can. After taking the batteries from the second, he ditches it too.

The bombs sewn into the lining of his jacket are now unable to detonate, and that is a terribly good thing. He no longer remembers putting them there.

He leaves the airport. As Usagi's plane circles overhead in the lee of the storm, he unwraps the stick of gum, places it between his lips, and smiles.

Chipped tooth and all, it's bright as the moon.


End file.
